Anne Treisman

Professor Anne Treisman FRS

Biography

Anne Treisman was a cognitive psychologist who studied how our attention — the process of selectively concentrating on a particular aspect of information — shapes our perception of the world. She was best known for her feature integration theory of attention, along with the development of many of the experimental methods that underpin visual research to this day.

The feature integration theory proposes that our brain breaks down our surroundings into a series of features — such as colour, size or motion — that are processed individually, with attention acting to bind these features into a cohesive whole.